Do I need a lawyer to file bankruptcy?

When self-filing is reasonable

The genuinely simple Chapter 7 exists, and it looks like this: income comfortably below your state’s median, no real estate (or equity clearly inside the homestead), an ordinary car, no business, no recent property transfers or big payments to relatives, no lawsuits mid-flight, debts that are plainly the dischargeable kind. For that case, the forms are tedious but not treacherous, courts publish pro se guides, and Upsolve, a legitimate nonprofit, provides a free tool that has helped many thousands of simple-case filers prepare Chapter 7 paperwork. If that paragraph describes you and money is truly unavailable, self-filing is a defensible path. (So is one more attempt at counsel: legal aid offices and bar pro bono programs handle exactly these cases, and the find-an-attorney article covers who to call.)

When it’s a false economy

Every feature your case adds is a place the savings can invert: a house (exemption and timing mistakes here are the catastrophic ones), above-median income (the long-form means test is judgment calls all the way down), recent transfers or repaid family loans, a business, tax debt (dischargeability is a calendar puzzle), cosigners you’re protecting, or anything already urgent. And Chapter 13 pro se is close to a coin you shouldn’t flip: confirmation is a negotiation with a professional trustee, and the completion statistics for unrepresented 13s are dismal. Since most of a 13’s attorney fee is paid through the plan anyway, the case for going alone there mostly evaporates.

One more trap with its own federal statute: “petition preparers,” the typing services and websites that fill in your forms for a fee. They’re legally barred from giving any advice, capped in what they can charge, and the advice is the entire value. Paying a preparer gets you a pro se case with worse odds and a middleman. Free nonprofit tool, real attorney, or truly on your own: those are the three honest options; the paid-typist fourth one isn’t.

The honest test

Not “am I smart enough” (the forms aren’t an IQ test) but: does anything in my case have a failure mode? If you can’t confidently answer what happens to every asset you own, that’s the answer. And use the free consultation either way; thirty minutes with an attorney who says “yours is simple, you could do this yourself” is the cheapest second opinion in law, and some will say exactly that.

The bottom line

The system permits self-representation; it doesn’t subsidize mistakes. Simple case plus no money: the pro se path and the nonprofit tools are real. Anything more: the fee is the cheap part of the case.